Prison saved my life and my career, admits reformed Murphy

A couple of prisoners hanged themselves during Timmy Murphy's 84 days at Her Majesty's pleasure in Wormwood Scrubs. A few were knifed and several others suffered the most vicious beatings.

And for the first week, the institutional violence of prison life hammered on the door of his cell.

"Big guys pounded on my door, shouting that they were going to stab me," Murphy recalls.

"I was terrified. I feared for my life. I did not go outside my cell for days until I felt it was safe to do so. I could not go out for my dinner.

I was petrified. I was surviving day by day, minute by minute, trying to find my feet, trying not to get stabbed."

Cowering in his cell, in the midst of a personal nightmare, deeply ashamed of his conviction for being drunk on an aeroplane and indecently assaulting a stewardess, Murphy heard the shouts of "rapist" from inmates who had read newspaper reports of a celebrated jockey being placed on the sexual offenders' register.

A mistake by the judge which took the best part of a week to rectify. The worst week of his 32 years.

Murphy remembers the horror and the terror of that summer of 2002 and makes what some might consider a startling conclusion.

"Prison was the making of me. I regret what I did but I don't regret paying the penalty for it. I deserved it.

"I guarantee that had I got off with a fine I would not have got the message. I would still be on the booze. I would not be here today but for what happened. Prison saved me."

Today, he rides for five-time champion owner David Johnson and has a second retainer with trainer Henrietta Knight, whose stable produced Best Mate. He has recently become engaged to Verity, the daughter of millionaire and top Scottish owner Ray Green.

The couple plan to marry in 2008. He is the proud father of five-year-old Shane, the welcome product of his relationship with former girlfriend Dawn.

Murphy answers the door with a big smile and a bigger welcome. Gone is the surly, suspicious, reticent individual of an interview two years previously when — notwithstanding the requirement to save the best material for an autobiography — he found it too painful to talk about his time in jail and what led to his incarceration.

Instead there lies on the couch, picking periodically from a bag of liquorice, a bright eyed and, it has to be said, bushy-tailed Irish charmer, attentive to his visitor and only occasionally diverted to the compulsory jockey's widescreen spewing out repeat races.

"I am much happier," Murphy says. "It is only in the last few years that I have started to enjoy life and actually live properly. Every day is an experience."

He looks like a man in love. "Yes, but you can't print that. I have got a reputation to keep up. I'll get terrible stick in the weighing room if the jockeys hear that."

He is so bubbly he could be on something. He is. He is addicted to life, as well as alcohol.

"I was more of a messer than a bad drunk. Practical jokes, silly stuff, a happy drunk in the main. There was the odd night that I would get into a tussle.

"It depended on what mood you started out on because you do turn into a different person.'

So often did he get out of control during those weekend binges, which he had regarded as part of normal life since his teenage days, that a former flatmate reckoned it only a matter of time before Murphy killed himself or someone else.

In the event, he escaped, if that's the right word, with being sentenced to six months imprisonment.

His own account of his gross behaviour on flight VS 901 from Tokyo to Heathrow, pieced together from eye witnesses and the prosecution narrative, provides one of the more graphic passages in his remarkably candid autobiography, Riding The Storm.

"I started banging on the door of the cockpit, apparently thinking it was the toilet. I had wet my seat. When they didn't open the door I urinated up against the fuselage.

"The prosecutor said that during my first encounter with the stewardess I called her a 'f****** whinger' and then, when she was passing by my seat later on, I grabbed her leg and moved my hand up her skirt.'

Murphy remembers none of this. Not at the time and not now. He has not had a drink since.

"I am definitely a better jockey for not drinking. A lot more goes through my head. Things are planned out more. I am more aware of things going on around. I am sharper, keener and I have a better feel of the horse. I enjoy it a lot more.

"There would have been mornings when I rode out still drunk. I would have ridden races in the afternoon when I was still over the limit. A dangerous thing to do. It would have given me a false sense of bravery. I might have been more reckless than usual."

His excess drinking and poor timekeeping lost him jobs, good ones with the likes of Paul Nicholls and Kim Bailey, but his natural horsemanship and sympathetic riding kept him in demand.

That cut no ice in the Scrubs and, initially at least, being a well known sportsman worked against him. "Being known and having my picture in the papers made me a target for both sides, for prisoners and for guards.

"I know it sounds daft but I just denied it was me. I said over and over again they had the wrong guy.

"There was a racing fan who was in a cell with one of the main prisoners. I could not trust the racing guy. I did not know him from Adam. You never know people's game plan inside.

"I told him I was not Timmy Murphy. But he sorted me out, arranging for me to take his place in the cell when he left."

Which is how Murphy ended up on the first floor sharing with a Mike Tyson look-alike doing a long stretch for armed robbery and grievous bodily harm.

"Tyson" ran the kitchens. He pretty much ran the jail. He arranged a painting job for Murphy and welcomed him with some advice.

"He said: 'Don't annoy me and no-one will annoy you, mind your own business and keep your nose clean'. Not a word was said after that. I kept my head down and myself to myself.

"The prison bookie was always looking for information. But it was during the flat season and I was no good to him. I fell into the routine.

"Up early in the morning, make coffee, drink coffee, off to paint the block, two sides, four storeys, walls and cells. Lunch and break, back painting in the afternoon.

"I was paid £9 a week. I enjoyed it in a way. It gave me something to do and helped pass the time.

"The two guys I worked with kept telling me to slow down _ they had 12 months still to serve. The evenings were for receving letters, reading and writing replies."

You might assume that Murphy would never again have a brush in his hand. But he has done a bit of redecorating since. And he can joke about his acquired expertise.

"Roller rather than brush, you get a better finish. And don't leave the paint in the tray too long."

"I keep that one thought in my mind. It is great for me that I have such a big thing in my life to help with the fight against alcoholism.

"I do not have to think back very far or very hard about the bad that can happen because of alcohol. It outweighs every good night I had on the mickey. I abhorred prison and never want to go back."

The big meeting at Cheltenham this weekend traditionally provides the Murphy/Johnson/Pipe (now David, not Martin) axis of jockey, owner and trainer with a handful of winners.

The spotlight will be on Murphy and his constant companions.

"The demons are still there, on my back, on my shoulder, in my saddlebag. They will probably always be there. But for now, perhaps for ever, they are under control. Fortune has smiled down on me in spite of my best efforts."